Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Russ and Daughters Cafe To Open May 7

The Lower East Side has changed radically since many of our grandparents and great grandparents came through the immigrant neighborhood. But small markers of its Jewish past remain — if you know where to look. Perhaps one of the best ones is the iconic neon Russ & Daughters Appetizing sign on East Houston.

When the legendary bagel and lox Mecca opens their first café tomorrow on Orchard Street, a new neon sign will mark the spot. The New Yorker stopped by the shop and the studio of Let There Be Neon, the company that made the sign, to find out the back story.

Watching the molding of the neon lights and the slicing of the lox is mesmerizing. “That steady meditative focused work of shaping and blowing the glass immediately reminded me of what happens at Russ & Daughters,” says fourth-generation co-owner Nikki Russ.

A bystander in the clip says: “Just looking at the sign makes me hungry.” Us too.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.